Using social media can have benefits for your mental health, but only if you use it in the right way

Whether I’m standing on the tram, sitting in a café, or walking down the street, I’m struck by the sight of so many people looking down at their phones, scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or a myriad of other social media platforms.

I immediately ask myself, in this increasingly technological age, what is the impact of constant social media use on our mental health?

On one hand, it allows us to stay up-to-date and connected. I can find out what friends in America and around the world are doing at any time of day or night.

On the other, it’s hard to carry on a normal conversation without someone compulsively checking their feed, rendered paranoid by FOMO (fear of missing out). A person might have thousands of “friends”, but feel completely alone.

So is social media good or bad for us? In a new study published in the Journal of Mental Health, PhD student Elizabeth Seabrook, Dr Nikki Rickard from Monash University and myself found that it is not as clear-cut as you might think.

We reviewed 70 studies that have examined how social network use relates to depression, anxiety, and subjective well being. Results were mixed. Some studies found social media users were happier and more connected with other people.

But other studies found that social media users had more signs of depression or anxiety. So we also looked at various factors that had an impact on when it is beneficial or harmful.

Studies were conducted between 2005 and 2016, mostly with adolescents and young adults. Most focused on Facebook, with a few studies centred around the use of Twitter, MySpace, or social media in general.

These studies examined a variety of themes, including how much time people spent on social media, the number of friends they had, and whether or not they liked and felt accepted by their friends.

Also examined were the words they used, how much personal information they shared, whether they compared themselves with others, and how much they felt addicted to social media.

Someone can have thousands of online ‘friends’ but still feel alone.

Across the studies, it appears that it’s not so much that social media causes anxiety and depression, but that people have different ways of using social media, which may be more or less helpful.

For example, Chris, who reported high levels of wellbeing, liked to use Facebook to catch up on the latest gossip and share with others fun things that happened during the day.

Meanwhile, Carey, who suffers from depression, spent hours browsing the newsfeed, and bemoaning how nice everyone else’s life seems.

For many, social media appears to have a range of benefits. It provides a way for many of us to connect with others. We can support other people and feel supported by them. It may even be a useful way for those with social anxiety and those who have a hard time with face-to-face interactions to connect with others.

But for those with depression or anxiety, it could make their symptoms worse. Indeed people who often compared themselves to their friends, ruminated about life, or had negative interactions with others, were at greater risk of depression and anxiety.

Notably, the number of hours that people spent on social media didn’t make a clear difference – it was more the feeling of being addicted to it. It seems like what a person writes about is more indicative of their state of mental health than the number of hours spent online.

Those with symptoms of depression were more likely to be jealous of their friends, compare themselves to others, and use negative language when using social media. This is similar to what I’ve seen in some of my other research, which points to the power of the words that we use.

A growing number of studies suggest that we might be able to use data from social media use to identify people suffering from depression or anxiety, thereby providing the possibility for offering support and resources for those who might not otherwise get the help they need.

So what can we take away from the study? We each have unique patterns in how we use social media, in terms of the language we use and how we behave when we are using it.

Do you keep your friends updated on your activities? Post pictures of your family? Complain about work or other people? Passively browse news feeds without commenting? Do you feel like it helps you connect with others, or do you feel addicted and controlled by it?

As a whole, our review suggests that it is valuable to pause and consider what our behavioural patterns are. By understanding them better, we potentially can make better choices about how to best use social media, as well as use it to promote good mental health.

Great. This is a necessary behavior in the face of the election of the most overtly racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti- gender and sexual minority candidate in the history of the modern United States. You know the rhetoric of his campaign was wrong. It was the very worst thing about America and you want to do what you can to combat the result. Good. Do that.

But don’t do it without a plan. Because the very last thing a tense situation needs is someone full of good intentions but with no knowledge of de-escalation tactics or self-defense. Your intentions are not a tangible shield. If you don’t make a plan, you will get yourself or the person you are trying to defend very killed.

Let’s avoid that.

So make a plan.

Some of you can stop reading now. You have, or know how to make a plan and you don’t need…

Like this:

Friendship might be even more golden than we think. A study finds that having good relationships with friends and family boosts not just your mental health, but physical one as well.

Researchers combined data from four large studies that have been following, for decades, the physical and mental well-being of thousands of Americans between the ages of 12 and 91. They focused on social ties that participants reported, such as number of friends and amount of family support, and markers of physical health, including obesity, blood pressure and inflammation, over subsequent years.

The researchers found that the more socially connected a person was, the lower their blood pressure down the road. For adolescents, being popular also seemed to protect against becoming overweight and, specifically, from gaining weight in the mid-section.

“These findings add support for the theory that social integration buffers the daily stresses that we all experience [by] having people to talk to, share experiences and the hassles of everyday life with,” said Kathleen Mullan Harris, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina. Harris led the new research, which was published on January 4 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

When we are socially isolated and don’t have this buffer, we may have higher levels of stress hormones in the body such as adrenaline that “breaks down the body and biological systems,” Harris said.

“We hope our research will bring attention within the biomedical field to the importance of social factors and that doctors seeing their patients even in an annual visit will not just see what risks they have like diabetes but ask them about their social activities,” Harris said. Doctors could encourage patients to develop their social connections and engage in more activities, she said.

Why social connections boost health

Research has piled up over the years suggesting that loneliness can kill. Social isolation has been linked with 30% higher risk of early death. It has also been associated with higher risk of diseases “across the board,” such as heart disease, stroke and cancer, Harris said.

The current study is a big stride forward because it supports the idea that social connections could be directly influencing health rather than the other way around, said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University.

There have been questions over whether health outcomes such as obesity could actually be causing people to become more socially isolated, said Holt-Lunstad, who was not involved in the current study but has conducted research on the social relationships and risk of death. However, because the current study followed participants over time, it could tell that people were already socially isolated before they became overweight or developed high-blood pressure.

Friends, family and spouses could be having beneficial effects on stress levels and other physiological markers, Holt-Lunstad said. But there could also be a slew of additional ways that these relationships boost our health.

“It can be everything from the time we’re little we have our parents encouraging us to eat our vegetables … to a spouse or romantic partner encouraging us to get more sleep,” Holt-Lunstad said. Friends and family can make us more likely to adhere with medical treatments and make doctor’s appointments, she added.

However, friends can also have negative effects on your health. If you have close relationships with smokers, you are more likely to smoke, for example, Holt-Lunstad said.

It depends on how old you are

The kinds of health benefits that we stand to gain through better social relationships probably depends on what age we are, Harris said.

For adolescents, social connections have a similar effect on weight as exercise. The young people in this study could be especially at risk of becoming overweight because they belong to a cohort from the late 1990s when the obesity epidemic really took off, said Harris, who is director of the adolescent cohort Add Health.

Among the older adults in this study, social isolation was about as big a risk factor for developing high-blood pressure as having diabetes. These connections could be especially important later in life because that is when people are really at risk of high-blood pressure later, Harris said.

Unlike with the young and older age groups, social integration did not seem to influence measures such as weight and blood pressure for middle-aged adults. However, while the quantity of relationships did not seem to matter, the quality did. Participants in this age group who reported having the most relationship strain had higher levels of BMI and C-reactive protein than those reporting the least strain.

“It makes perfect sense from a life course perspective — in middle age you are naturally embedded in so many networks [with children, parents, your community], it’s almost involuntary that you’re in all these networks,” Harris said. Instead, “it was more what those connections give you.”

You have to have the right friends

One of the strengths of this study is that it found a dose effect of social relationships, meaning the more relationships you have, the greater the health benefits, Holt-Lunstad said.

“Many people assume there’s a threshold effect – if you’re lonely or isolated you’re at risk, but as long as you’ve got someone in your life you’re OK,” Holt-Lunstad said.

Having a mix of different relationships also could be beneficial.

“Different people in your life potentially influence you in different ways … by having these different relationships we may be tapping into additional (biological) pathways that combine to a stronger effect,” Holt-Lunstad said.
“We can all benefit from taking our relationships just as seriously for our health as we do other lifestyle factors,” she said.